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In London later tonight, lawyers at the phone hacking trial begin the second week of their defence of the former News of the World editor, Rebekah Brooks. Last week, the court heard extraordinary evidence about an email she wrote recounting an extensive conversation in which former Prime Minister, Tony Blair, advised her on how to handle the hacking crisis.

Transcript

MARK COLVIN: In London later tonight, lawyers at the phone hacking trial begin the second week of their defence of the former News of the World editor Rebekah Brooks.

Last week, Ms Brooks told the court that she had never heard of the hacker Glenn Mulcaire, who did extensive work for the newspaper when she was editor.

The court also heard extraordinary evidence about an email she wrote recounting an extensive conversation in which former prime minister Tony Blair advised her on how to handle the hacking crisis.

Peter Jukes is an author and blogger who's been tweeting and blogging the phone-hacking trial live.

I asked him if the Blair email revelations had come as a shock.

PETER JUKES: Well, I think for the world it was a big bombshell: absolute final proof that they had been very close to the Murdochs and to Rebekah Brooks.

It had been known about. I mean, he'd been the godfather of Wendi Deng's one of her children with Rupert. But I think it's just that blatant level of support just as the phone hacking crisis was at its height. This was the day after the News of the World closed. Brooks was about to be arrested, so I think it certainly caused the biggest stir of the trial I think of the last month or so.

MARK COLVIN: And it also shed some real light on the way that the former prime minister thinks about what royal commissions do and how you can use them.

PETER JUKES: Well we have to be a little bit careful here Mark, because this is her recollection, Brooks' recollection, of that conversation with Blair. Whether he said Hutton-style report - you know, this is the report into the death of David Kelly which some regard as a whitewash - whether he used that tone, we don't know, though maybe we'll find out later. There'll be more detail forthcoming.

MARK COLVIN: When she came to give evidence, and of course it's only the beginning of her defence, what really came out?

PETER JUKES: I mean, there are lots of little details for geeks like me who follow Fleet Street and know this story quite well.

What I suppose came out was a mixed message, in a way: that she was young, very young, promoted without being told. The morning, you know, she was told she was going to be editor of The Sun an hour before she started editing it.

And in a very blokey world that she came up through this very, you know, nearly all the people above her were men. She'd worked with women in journalism. And so you have this image of somebody, either way, promoted very quickly, maybe a bit out of her depth.

But then we got glimpses of somebody who, when she's running the paper News of the World, was dealing with Beckham and the Countess of Wessex, basically mixing with royalty and celebrity and dealing with them as an equal. So there's a slight, you know, putting the picture together of Brooks is going to be quite a long process.

MARK COLVIN: But it is clear that she had control over very large sums of money?

PETER JUKES: Exactly. That was, you know, we're talking these huge budgets. What the prosecution have been asserting is that she should have known because the budgets, the money to Mulcaire, who was the phone hacker. What her defence is doing quite effectively is saying how could she have known? There was so much money coming through here.

So that's what the jury have to decide: was it easy to say News of the World wasn't War and Peace, you should have known what was going on in your own paper. But certainly so much money, they had a profit of 30 million a year, so that was a big paper with a lot of money.

MARK COLVIN: But she has said that she had to be a bit careful about money on some stories and had to be careful not go over certain limits, and at the same time she's saying that she didn't know about the thousands that were going out to private investigators for phone hacking?

PETER JUKES: Well, she did say there was - I think it was over a million went to Mulcaire over about six years; only three years of course were her editorship - that's what the jury has to decide. Who do you believe?

Is that possible that there were large sums of money going out and the other thing she was saying is journalists protect their sources. They don't tell you where the story comes from.

I think the most interesting thing personally is this big emphasis on Sarah's Law, her care for children. This Sarah's Law was a (inaudible) campaign she made after a young girl, Sarah Payne, was killed by a convicted sex offender.

What we're going to get to soon is the case of Milly Dowler. That's where most of the allegations go that her phone was hacked - that missing, murdered teenager from 2002.

So, with everything you, again you're saying "I care about children, I was a campaigning tabloid editor," then you have to ask, well didn't, you know, what's going to happen to Milly Dowler? Are you going to say you weren't following that story, you didn't know what was in your paper? Because in the paper for that were recorded voicemail messages from Milly Dowler's phone.

MARK COLVIN: So how long is this going to take, and presumably this is just her main evidence, there's cross-examination to come is there?

PETER JUKES: I think everybody's waiting for cross-examination indeed. That's going to be, I suppose, the moment where she can finally answer the charges against her and then can be re-examined. That's going to happen in about 10 days I think, maybe slightly less, maybe for a week.

So we've got about three weeks, with maybe two of Brooks and then a week of witnesses probably, and that's going to go on for the other six defendants, though others might be shorter.

MARK COLVIN: Peter Jukes, who live tweets the hacking trial on Twitter as @peterjukes, speaking to me from London.